The Ethical Use of Outer Space - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 110

Cooperative ventures in space can lead to better international relationships and
confi dence building, but Dinerman ( 2013 ) warns of the asymmetric proliferation of
space power, where the military of wealthier nations use satellites for reconnais-
sance, targeting and managing theatres of war, and weaker nations consider defend-
ing themselves by developing antisatellite systems.
Military space budgets are diffi cult to establish and are usually estimated from
unclassifi ed offi cial sources and selected non-offi cial sources or based upon overall
national space spending or overall military budget trends. A clear distinction
between military space and civil space spending is also often blurred by dual-use
programmes and applications. The 2014 Pentagon spending request included $8
billion for unclassifi ed military space programmes which is about the same as was
received in 2013 and which was a cut of 22% from 2012 budget. The United States
undoubtedly spends the most on military space activities, and it is likely that they
spend as much as the rest of the world put together and so the total global military
space spending is possibly around $20 billion.
The initial development of modern day space technologies was through a mili-
tary route - starting in 1930s Germany with the work of Nazi rocket pioneers led by
Wernher von Braun. Their V2 missiles were constructed at Mittelwerk in tunnels
under Kohnstein Mountain near Nordhausen by slave labour from the Dora,
Harzungen and Ellrich concentration camps. In the 20 months of construction work
that took place at Mittelwerk, around one half of the 60,000 prisoners used to build
the rockets died of starvation and abuse (mass executions were commonplace)
(Béon 1997 ). More people were killed in the construction of the rockets than the
rockets killed at their targets.
At the end of the war, von Braun and his team were gathered together by the US
Army and were assimilated into the United States. At that time, anyone who had
been a member of the Nazi party or an active supporter of Nazism or German mili-
tarism was not allowed to work in the United States, so a programme known as
'Operation Paperclip' (Lasby 1975 ; Thieme 2003 ) was used to obscure the histories
of the German scientists and engineers. This operation, which lasted well into the
1950s, allowed the law and presidential directive to be bypassed to enable von
Braun's group to continue building rockets in the United States. They produced the
fi rst ICBMs and the Saturn V which was used by the United States to transport the
fi rst humans to the Moon in 1969.
The Soviets also took their share of German scientists from von Braun's team
and the V2 technology was copied for their fi rst missile, the R-1, a later version of
which (the R-7) was used to launch the world's fi rst artifi cial satellite in 1957.
Sputnik 1 was a small 58-cm (23-in.)-diameter polished metal sphere, launched into
a low elliptical Earth (Asif Siddiqi 2006 ). It caused general panic in the United
States because it meant that the Soviets had the capability to reach (and possibly
target) anywhere on the planet from their own territory. Therefore, this event
launched not only a space race but also a new type of potential arms race. From
these less than auspicious beginnings, space technology developed in the United
States and the USSR through the political and military competitiveness of the
Cold War.